Black sky, glittering vistas on the horizon, all in digital

I woke up in what looked like an ethereal graveyard--if you've seen Raziel's spirit world from the Soul Reaver series or after you've died in World of Warcraft, that's kind of what it was like. Everything kind of a blue hue. I found an energy blade and a plasma pistol, and began exploring.

The architecture was incredibly detailed. Future-age headstones and crosses, and in the centre, an ornate morgue-structure. Or maybe a crypt. Somewhere in this area I found Frigo, and that I was playing a videogame with him, and that we needed to get to the next area.

The sky was pitch black. Far off over the horizon was a mirage-like vista of some red buildings. A little to the left of this vista, further back even, were yellow spires--it must've been the desert zone, we thought. Right of the red, and further down than the desert, was a barely visible teal/turqoise glitter, and behind us was a foreboding demonic purple.

We opened a portal, finding an item in our inventories, to the red area--if you've played Planescape: Torment, it kind of served as a locale like Spire. It was a hub, in the center of just about everything except that purple area, which was the demon world; the final destination.

Once our portal was opened, a particle-filled gateway appeared on the edge of of current area, directly in front of the red horizon. We stepped through, and were taken on a lightspeed journey to our destination. As we neared, we looked to our right, and the turqoise area , we found, was far more elaborate than we first thought: it was a huge, sprawling metropolice of crystalline palaces that reached into the sky like mountains. We hardly had any time, though, before we found ourselves in a boarding-room of sorts in what felt like a large casion/hotel.

We didn't much know what to do, only that we should probably stay away from the "Border Worlds," the spaces inbetween the zones we had noted; my best guess is they were randomly-generated Diablo 2-like wildernesses of some kind of spectral plane. Taking our own advice, we decided we wanted to try and reach the crystal metropolis, and exited the hotel into a gothic-styled city.

It wasn't very red. The sky was still a dark, black, void, in fact. Well, except off to one side, where we could still see that turquoise hue among dozens of glittering spires. The building we had left looked misplaced: it looked like some sort of starport from the outside, where we felt like we were in one of the towns from Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest, though much more spread out.

We actually ran into a fair number of undead creatures, zombies and the like, and had our first battles. Every door was locked among the mostly-roadless city (muddy grass, instead). We went back to the starport, and ran into a character that appeared to function as a janitor of some sort.

He told us that the other portals were down, and would be down for quite a while--we were stuck. So we explored the starport. Turning down a barren corridor to the left of a roulette table, we exited to a cobblestone-floored alley. Set in the middle was a long table, empty, and far on the other end of the area/room/alley were a few thugs.

"Free experience!" we thought, and I fired off a plasma round.

Too late, we realized a heavily-armed police officer was accompanying the thugs. He ran after us and took a hit at me, taking more than half my life down with one shot. We quickened our steps, and lost him in front of a door which had a sign on it. I can't remember the specific words, but it told us that behind the door was the portal control room.

But it was locked, so we turned back around. When we reached the alley again, the table was filled with thugs--three kinds: punk thugs that wielded blunt objects or small bkades, gangless thugs that wore more normal dress and carried longer blades, and Yakuza-like thugs that carried sub-machine guns and pistols. We had crashed some kind of gang-land meeting, and agan were forced to take flight.

Hastily, we made the decision that we should attempt to best one of the Border Worlds. It would be a long, lonely trek, we knew, but we would actually get somewhere. Passing the janitor, now talking to a manager, we set our sights on the yellow-hued zone; probably a desert.

Then, perfect timing, my alarm clock blared: 9am. I got about 3 hours of sleep, I think, though the four hours of non-sleep were largely silent, so I could think peacefully.

Somewhere before the gaming dream, I dreamt up a strange scare-scenario that I think might have precursed Frigo and mine's entry into that ethereal graveyard:

I overheard my former roommate talking about how, the previous night, his cellphone rang as he was driving through the forest back home. In fact, it rang precisely when he looked up at the dark sky and saw a fiery object zoom through the sky. When he had gotten home, he was grimly informed that his sister had been on board a plane that had crashed--he never answered his cellphone, and when he checked the number that had called him, sure enough, it was his sister's boyfriends' cell number.

The newspaper headlines didn't explain much: electrical storms down airplane. The talk shows asked scientists for their opinions; how the downed plane could have possbly, accordng to blackbox information, have reached a speed of 430-something miles per hour. Now, if that is a normal, or even a slow speed, for airplanes, I apologize, but, somehow, it came to me that that was the kind of speed rocket ships exploited to defy the groundedness of humanity and enter outer space.

Electrical storms. Something had happened that, like in the backstory of Half-life 2, sparked, almost immediately, sporadic, unpredictable, dangerous cloudless lightning storms. They almost seemed magical.

I was talking about it with my parents as my dreaming segued into the ethereal graveyard scenario.

Half a paper to write, and lots of Philosophy to study today. Tomorrow, around 2PM, I hope to finally be, for the most part, stress free: enough, in fact, to not skip my Stats class on Wednesday (seeing as how I skipped it again this morning).